Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various software or hardware failures. The moment a file is damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on larger hard disks where vast volumes of info are located. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers today often cannot identify corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. Most internet hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive gets damaged for some reason, however, it's likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because alternative file systems do not have special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be substituted with a good one from a different hard disk drive. Since this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system that keeps track of all of the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, all the other file systems perform checks only after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you could lose critical data. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.